MRI Research Unit, Department of Radiology, Hospital del Mar, Barcelona, Spain.
CIBER de Salud Mental, Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Barcelona, Spain.
Eur Psychiatry. 2023 Oct 18;66(1):e84. doi: 10.1192/j.eurpsy.2023.2463.
Observations from different fields of research coincide in indicating that a defective gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) interneuron system may be among the primary factors accounting for the varied clinical expression of schizophrenia. GABA interneuron deficiency is locally expressed in the form of neural activity desynchronization. We mapped the functional anatomy of local synchrony in the cerebral cortex in schizophrenia using functional connectivity MRI.
Data from 86 patients with schizophrenia and 137 control subjects were obtained from publicly available repositories. Resting-state functional connectivity maps based on Iso-Distant Average Correlation measures across three distances were estimated detailing the local functional structure of the cerebral cortex.
Patients with schizophrenia showed weaker local functional connectivity (i.e., lower MRI signal synchrony) in (i) prefrontal lobe areas, (ii) somatosensory, auditory, visual, and motor cortices, (iii) paralimbic system at the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex, and (iv) hippocampus. The distribution of the defect in cortical area synchrony largely coincided with the synchronization effect of the GABA agonist alprazolam previously observed using identical functional connectivity measures. There was also a notable resemblance between the anatomy of our findings and cortical areas showing higher density of parvalbumin (prefrontal lobe and sensory cortices) and somatostatin (anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex) GABA interneurons in humans.
Our results thus provide detail of the functional anatomy of synchrony changes in the cerebral cortex in schizophrenia and suggest which elements of the interneuron system are affected. Such information could ultimately be relevant in the search for specific treatments.
来自不同研究领域的观察结果一致表明，缺陷型γ-氨基丁酸（GABA）中间神经元系统可能是导致精神分裂症临床表现多样化的主要因素之一。GABA 中间神经元的缺陷以神经活动去同步化的形式在局部表达。我们使用功能连接磁共振成像（fcMRI）来描绘精神分裂症大脑皮层局部同步的功能解剖结构。
从公共可用的存储库中获取了 86 名精神分裂症患者和 137 名对照受试者的数据。基于等距平均相关测度（Iso-Distant Average Correlation measures）在三个距离上估计了静息态功能连接图，详细描述了大脑皮层的局部功能结构。
精神分裂症患者表现出较弱的局部功能连接（即较低的 MRI 信号同步性），具体表现在：（i）前额叶区域，（ii）躯体感觉、听觉、视觉和运动皮层，（iii）前岛叶和前扣带回的边缘系统，以及（iv）海马体。皮层区域同步性缺陷的分布与先前使用相同功能连接测量方法观察到的 GABA 激动剂阿普唑仑的同步效应基本一致。我们的发现的解剖结构与人类大脑中 GABA 中间神经元密度较高的区域（前额叶皮层和感觉皮层）和生长抑素（前岛叶和前扣带回皮质）之间也存在显著的相似性。
因此，我们的结果提供了精神分裂症大脑皮层同步变化的功能解剖细节，并提示了哪些中间神经元系统受到了影响。这些信息最终可能与寻找特定治疗方法有关。
